Bu Photography Research Paper

Photography’s “mysterious” beginnings and growth due to social desires were the first instances in which it could be seen that the way people say the world around them would completely change. The human desire to continue to find a better type of production lead to the ability to mass produce images and therefore allowed for information to be spread nationally as well as international. Photography allowed people to see places they had never seen, they were able to help support scientific discoveries as well as disprove racial remarks, and they created a panic and distrust in human vision and believes that never existed before. The “invention” of photography was chaotic, as multiple people began to claim that they had the idea of photography and that they had developed the first proper piece of equipment,

During the 19th century, slave labor was used a primary use of human labor and with an abolishment movement on the rise scientist tried to use photography to prove the superiority of the “white race” over the “black race”. Louis Agassiz was a leader in the usage of “Slave Daguerreotypes” to prove the theory of polygenesis and ultimately justify the treatment of slaves. While Agassiz opposed slavery his works where used to justify the white man superiority, yet his photographic experiment, the images of Jack taken by J.T. Zealy, prevented people from viewing his “finding” as objective. Rather than looking at the images of slaves and seeing inferior human beings people wanted to know who they were and how they lived. The perspective of a slave shaped into the perspective of a human; people could not use photography to support the idea of polygenesis. Agassiz was betrayed by his work, the images showed agency when they refused to submit to Agassiz’s